Optimism, a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, reported in a blog post on June 9 about the theft of 20 million (worth approx. $35 million) OP tokens due to an address error from the company’s end. As per the blog post, the Optimism team was transferring 20 million OP tokens designated for a loan to Wintermute. However, a mixup with another address resulted in a hacker being able to take out the funds.
Does the company try to prevent the theft?
The whole episode of OP token theft was possible as the given address was for an Ethereum/L1 multisig address that has not yet been deployed to Optimism. Wintermute attempted to launch a recovery operation in order to deploy the L1 multisig transaction to the same L2 address, but the hacker came first. They took the tokens after deploying the L1 multisig to L2 with altered initialization values.
Current market value of these 20 million tokens
One million of the tokens out of 20 million have already been purchased. Wintermute has stated that it intends to repurchase the stolen tokens by tracking the hacker’s IP address. The company further explained that it will not try to prevent the token flow of those stolen tokens by issuing an update as it would set a bad precedent.
Hey folks–in the interest of transparency, we'd like to share some details about an ongoing situation:https://t.co/915vIgRIJG
Summary below 🧵👇
— Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) (@optimismPBC) June 8, 2022
In the spirit of transparency, the team described the facts, but there is no doubt that some harm was done. Apart from having faith in the scaling solution itself, the crypto community was thrilled to see a pioneering governance mechanism developed. However, with the hack, there has been a shift in the community, with some criticising the response to the situation while others praising its transparency.
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